I do not drink beer. I have said so in print before now, and it is still true, so the honest place to start is that I booked the Heineken Experience in …

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes a few hours to get through, and by the end of mine the paintings had stopped landing. The garden outside fixed that faster than a coffee would …

We went to Flow on the morning after King’s Day. King’s Day falls on 27 April and is the Dutch national holiday for the King’s birthday. The country spends it outdoors and …

People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …

I do not drink beer. I booked a beer tour anyway, paid extra for the upgraded version of it, and spent an hour in a bar hidden behind a refrigerator door. That …

Every May I go to the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa. It is a fixture of my spring, and after enough visits I thought I had a reasonable idea of what a …

We went up twice during our stay. Once in the late afternoon, when the doors onto the terrace had been folded back and the sun was coming in low across the room, …

We had breakfast first, at Locals, a few minutes away, and then walked over to Stadhouderskade because the tour was booked for a specific time and the VIP one does not wait …

I crossed Dam Square four or five times over a week in Amsterdam and it never once impressed me. That is not what the guidebooks say. This is the most important public …

Amsterdam on 27 April is orange. King’s Day empties the offices and fills the canals, and by mid-afternoon most of the city is on a boat, on a bicycle, or sitting on …

I will be honest about my first impression, because it was wrong and it took an hour to correct. From the square, the Royal Palace underwhelmed me. I had come to Amsterdam …

Here is what I knew about Jean-Michel Basquiat before I walked into that room: he went out with Madonna. That was it. That was the whole of it. A man with work …